Modern humans have been trained to believe that efficiency and urgency should be prioritized at all costs — leaving us in a constant loop of nervous system dysregulation. The hormonal surges of cortisol and adrenaline, and the subsequent crash that follows, can trigger reactions that are difficult — sometimes impossible — to reverse.
And yet, here we are. Chasing the next urgent thing, wondering why we feel so depleted.
What if the problem isn’t our circumstances, but the speed at which we’re reacting to them?
The Brain’s Alarm System
At the center of this story is a small but mighty structure called the amygdala — the brain’s emotional alarm system. Located in the temporal lobe and part of the limbic system, this tiny region (roughly the size of an almond) detects emotional significance, especially fear, and triggers our fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. It links memories to emotions and guides our emotional learning. In short, it is both our greatest protector and, at times, our most dramatic saboteur.
I say this as someone who recently got an uncomfortably close look at her own amygdala in full action.
Enter the Dogs
Let me set the scene.
I was on a call with a colleague — in full-blown creative collaboration mode. The flow was flowing, lighting up all the good brain centers with dopamine and serotonin. We were achieving things. Ideas were sparking. Life was good.
And then I heard it: teeth gnashing and intense guttural growling emanating from the living room. My dog Milo and his visiting cousin Luna were having a major showdown about something
.
My body leapt from the chair before my mind had formed a single thought. And then a sound started pouring out of me — escalating, relentless shrieking. “No. No. Stop. Please, stop.”
I would like to pause here and acknowledge something. My work is to help humans detach from reactivity, to investigate root causes, and to build habits that invite the unlearning of old patterns — creating space for new, more measured responses. I coach this. I write about this. I believe in this.
And there I was, shrieking the words No, in a discordant symphony of escalated tones
In that moment, I could feel the cortisol and adrenaline surging through my body. Worst-case scenarios were multiplying by the second: fatal harm, irreparable damage to my daughter’s beloved pup, a rift between me and my daughter, and the creeping thought of why didn’t I see this coming?
The entire episode in my mind— start to finish — lasted about seven minutes. (My daughter says maximum two. No blood was drawn. No permanent harm was done. Except, perhaps, to the ears in the vicinity.
All I can say is: I have more work to do. And also — I now have a much deeper awe of how quickly the alarm can be triggered.
The Speed of Fear
Here’s what makes the amygdala so hard to override: it can detect a threat and fire a fear response in as little as 50–74 milliseconds — before your conscious mind has even registered what’s happening. For context, one full second contains 1,000 milliseconds. Your brain’s fear system is reacting in roughly one-twentieth of a second.
Your body reacts in 50 milliseconds. Your conscious mind takes seconds. That gap is everything.
The prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for complex thinking, decision-making, and what we might call “good judgment” — operates on an entirely different timeline. High-level cognitive processing can take hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds to fully run its course. By the time you consciously “decide” to react, your body already has.
Think of the brain as a corporation with distinct departments. The amygdala is the security guard at the front door — fast, reactive, and not interested in nuance. The prefrontal cortex is the executive team upstairs — slower, but far better equipped to assess whether the threat is real, proportionate, and worth the energy being spent on it.
The problem is that the security guard has a direct line to your body, and the executive team is often stuck in a very long meeting.
What My Reactor Looked Like in Real Time
Back to the dogs.
In the first moments, my reactor was running the show entirely. I was shrieking — a sound I didn’t recognize as my own — and the dogs were not, in any way, responding to it. The cavalry was not appearing. Nothing was stopping. The shrieking was consuming oxygen and energy at a rate entirely unsustainable for the long game. The reactor, it turns out, is a sprinter.
Then, something began to shift. As the initial cortisol surge started to subside, I noticed my prefrontal cortex beginning to come online. My focus, which had been locked in resistance, slowly widened. I started taking in more details. I noticed — really noticed — that no blood was being drawn. I began to access what I actually knew: my dog trainer’s guidance on de-escalation, stored somewhere in my memory and finally becoming available.
I needed to create separation. I needed something that was not a human arm or leg. I scanned what was nearby and landed on a golf umbrella.
The umbrella worked.
And with it came something that had been completely absent in those first frantic seconds: optionality. My curiosity and problem-solving could now enter the scene. There was still urgency — but it was now paired with focus. Slow, but not passive. Deliberate, but not frozen.
The Amygdala Can’t Tell the Difference
Here is a fascinating and humbling fact: the amygdala cannot distinguish between a real threat and a perceived one. It releases the same cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline whether you are being chased by something dangerous or simply receiving a strongly-worded email. Its job is to make you pay attention and give you a burst of survival energy — not to assess whether the situation actually warrants it.
This is why anxiety, panic, phobias, hypervigilance, and PTSD flashbacks all feel so physiologically real. The body is responding to a threat signal that the thinking brain hasn’t yet had time to evaluate. And in many cases — by the time the evaluation happens — the reaction is already well underway.
The good news? We can train our response. We can build the habit of inserting a pause — not to eliminate the fear response, but to give the prefrontal cortex enough time to catch up.
Slow Is Still Urgent
Slowing down is not the same as disengaging. This is perhaps the most important distinction I want to offer.
When I found the umbrella, I wasn’t moving slowly because I had stopped caring. I was moving deliberately because I had — finally — accessed the part of my brain that could actually help. The urgency was still present. But it was now useful.
Breath is one of the most direct tools we have for making this shift. Normal resting breathing takes about three to five seconds per breath. In a fear response, that can drop to half a second. Deliberately slowing the breath — even for just a few cycles — activates the parasympathetic nervous system and begins to interrupt the amygdala’s hold. It doesn’t eliminate the alarm. It gives the rest of the brain a chance to respond to it.
Three Questions for the Trapdoor Moments
When the stimuli hit and the body starts to surge, there are three questions worth practicing — not in the heat of the first milliseconds, but in the moments just after, when the prefrontal cortex is beginning to re-engage:
1. Does this actually require my attention right now? In my case, yes — two dogs in conflict does require attention. But many of our 0-to-100 moments are triggered by situations that, on reflection, carry far less actual danger than the body initially signals.
2. Is my current response the most useful one available? The shrieking was not useful. It did not stop the dogs. It did not calm the situation. It consumed energy I needed for actual problem-solving. Asking this question mid-reaction can be the thing that opens the door to option two, option three — the umbrella.
3. Is my reaction commensurate to the danger? This is perhaps the most clarifying question of all. When the answer is no — and often it is — it creates just enough cognitive distance to step back from the reaction and into a response.
Inviting In a Little Grace
Milo and Luna recovered quickly. Dogs are remarkably good at that. I was slower to.
I spent a while afterward replaying the shrieking, cringing at the gap between who I try to be and who I was in those five to seven minutes. But that gap — the one between the amygdala’s speed and the prefrontal cortex’s wisdom — is not a character flaw. It is a design feature. An ancient one, built for a world where the threats were faster and more physical than a strongly-worded email or two dogs having a disagreement.
What we can do is practice. We can build the neural pathways that allow us to move from reaction to response a little more quickly each time. We can ask the three questions. We can breathe. We can keep a golf umbrella nearby.
And we can extend to ourselves the same grace we’d offer anyone else who, despite their best intentions, is still magnificently human.
If any of this resonated, I’d love to hear what your “umbrella moment” looked like — the moment your prefrontal cortex finally showed up. Drop it in the comments.
Caryn, this is wonderful! And I can picture the whole thing because I've been there too. One of the things I remembered while reading this is how good my dad was at deescalating arguments between my sister and me. He would come into the room and start talking to us in a low, measured, and quiet voice. My sister and I would always stop fighting so we could hear him. He worked that remarkable magic many times.
Great first post 👏